The act of "working" in knowledge is a fundamental aspect of being human. What has changed, instead, is the volume and mediums of information. The industrial revolution (among other things) helped drive an explosion in literacy rates around the world.

Frederik Gieschen wrote a piece called "The Reading Obsession." In it, he talks about how much investors LOVE to talk about how Warren Buffett just reads all day. The point he makes, instead, is that networking, building friendships, and traveling all played as important a role in Buffett's success as his reading.

Reading enables you to build a "prepared mind."

“In the fields of observation chance favors only the prepared mind.”

"The prepared mind, in a sense, is reacting to a different aspect of where opportunities come from. Preconditions. If you look at the great things that have happened in venture, there's a set of preconditions, a little bit like adaptation. Like people don't just start with a wing. It wasn't like all the sudden, insects could fly. There were preconditions, there little stubs that came off of amphibians, or fish, of course, we all came from fish, but if they didn't have a little stub, it wouldn't then compound towards the wings, so there's these preconditions. And so having a mobile phone penetration at 20% with GPS as a precondition for Uber, for Instagram."

Reading is the process by which we build a prepared mind. If you haven't done the work to understand the concepts, you're much less prepared in every conversation you go into.

we had Packy McCormick as our guest speaker. He talked about a similar evolution in his writing, where for a long time he felt the pressure to write each week. Eventually, he came to the conclusion that writing something good was more important than writing something each week.

"I write because I don't know what I think until I read what I say." (Flannery O'Connor)

one of my favorite experiences while talking, is talking about something that I've likely thought about a fair bit (see above: reading = prepared mind), but probably haven't ever really articulated. But then being forced to talk about it with someone, or to write out my perspective knowing that someone will read it... it's like I'm bringing that idea to life.